Tyulyubaeva T.O., Korneeva Ya.A., Simonova N.N. The Model of Psychological Safety for Oil and Gas Shift Workers in the Arctic

Abstract: The study sponsored by the Russian President's grant for state support of young Russian scientists - PhD (MK-7500.2016.6). The article is devoted to the justification of a model of psychological safety of oil and gas shift workers in the Arctic. Industrial safety in the first place depends on the employee, not only on his attitude to the observance of health and safety requirements but also on one's personal traits, his subjective experience and effectiveness of his psychological self-regulation. Thus, the analysis of the employee safe behavior should involve not only industrial and working conditions but also characteristics of one's psychological safety as a potential opportunity to avoid production errors. The study conducted on the oil and gas industry with a shift labour organization in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug (shift duration is 30 days). The study involved 70 people aged from 24 to 60 years (the average age is 38.7 ± 1.3). Research methods included: analysis of documentation, monitoring the work process, questionnaires, psycho-physiological and psychological testing, and statistical methods of data analysis. The study has clarified the concept of psychological safety as a mental state of control over a range of external and internal factors of the ergatic system triggering internal personality means to be professionally efficient at the psychophysiological and psychological levels. The authors introduce  and empirically support the model of psychological safety that is comprised of the following components: psychophysiological level of the functional status (reduced / optimal); psychological level of the functional state (emergency / economical); the image of an labour object (low undifferentiated risk assessment / highly differentiated risk assessment); the image of a labour subject (highly undifferentiated / moderately differentiated self-assessment); the image of the subject-object and subject-subject relations (neutral / negative / positive).

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